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Why We Should Build a Supercomputer Replica of the Human Brain
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Wired:
"[Henry] Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. ... The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety — from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness — is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them. And once that's done, once you've built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experience a brain other than your own."
And when you do this and it becomes sentient, doesn't it have rights?
Boom
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Replica This!
Simulating how the neurons and connections function won't be enough. You also need an initial state for each of them. Get even a tiny precentage of them wrong, and the result would probably be a virtual seizure.
sudo cat /dev/me > /dev/you
You are not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported to God.
The brain as a computer metaphor needs a rest. Our model of the brain stretches to fit our available information processing capabilities.
Build a replica of Snooki's brain.
develop a fluid that permeates the nervous system, accessing the Body Recovery Center, the portion of the Grey Matter of the Brain that has the complete mapping of the human body and all their features, and thus identifies possible future failures, such as cuts and injuries varied stimuli and sending them to repair enzymes. Take control of this region of the brainstem, overwriting all of this mapping, rewriting the form of how the body should truly be.
Once the modification is made Cerebral closed, this same body system evaluates the entire human body as erroneous and injured, then sending the information to the brain that all the body, externally and internally, is wrong, completely transforming it into a wound open to be healed and changed the standards recently rewritten.
-Aldrich Killian
"In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity's so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise."
"But for a time it was good."
"The machines worked tirelessly to do man's bidding."
"It was not long before seeds of descent took root. Though loyal and pure, the machines earned no respect from their masters, these strange, endlessly multiplying mammals."
I think the stake holders need to think about that simple question. The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
And that is how Skynet was born.
I doubt Kim Jong Un would volunteer to help the project anyway.
As a developer, I think initiatives like this are important.
As a person, I can't help but think that being the person trapped inside the computer would be absolutely horrifying.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
However, they might have the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything
It doesn't need to be a mirror image, but it needs to "develop" in the same manner.
The brain is plastic.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
To show politicians what they are not.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
make they can remake they saved hitler's brain
I think the stake holders need to think about that simple question. The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
Pestilent children are the worst, with all their plagues and their boils and their oozing pustules.
Robots will be so good at complex tasks that they will find it overkill to use one for simple tasks. They'll simply say, why waste a robot on this task when we have all of these stupid humans who are willing to do it for basically nothing. Half the quality at an eighth the price. Can't beat that.
We've long established that the source of the human "soul" is in the brain. Those interconnections give rise to consciousness and self-awareness -- and sentience. If you build something that precisely models the brain, you will be creating sentience. I have to question how we can create a sentient creature simply to experiment upon it and still claim to have a shred of humanity to us.
I know that this is not as dazzling and interesting as building the device to geeks like us, but we cannot simply ignore the ethical consequences of our actions. All vocations, all manner of human endeavor, must move forward with an eye towards a respect for life. This may not be human life we're creating, or even organic life, but it is no less deserving.
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The brain "develops" in humans for a very long time though, to work around /with that the mechanical brain would either need to be able to develop itself or start off in an adult state.
I have my doubts about the success of this project, but we've got to start somewhere & we'd learn a lot with this project, not like we don't spend our country's money on wars, or policing / giving aid to people who hate us instead.
How on earth do they manage to sell this bullshit to politicians and sponsors?
Experience a brain other than my own? Me think better with VR goggles and fake brain? I'm not sure I understand what that sentence meant. Perhaps I need some VR goggles.
"That's pretty much the time we can kiss our asses goodbye... unless we stop it." - John Connor, in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I'm proposing that we should build nanorobots to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere one molecule at a time. Only a lack of ambition is holding us back from implementing this perfect solution to global warming.
I'm proposing that we should dispose of our waste by shooting it out of the solar system with fusion-powered rockets instead of filling up the environment with landfills. Only a lack of ambition is preventing us from solving the problem of waste disposal.
I'm proposing that all governments respect the civil rights of their people. Only a lack of ambition stands between us and a world where everyone lives in freedom.
I'm proposing that we change the meaning of the word "ambition" so that it means "ability". If we just do that, then only a lack of ambition will stand between us and anything we want!
Say this actually works. We create a brain and start down the long path of "teaching" it just like with new-born humans.
What happens when we detect that the brain is "experiencing pain" (we already know that pain has a detectable neurological basis right?)
What happens when we detect the brain is experiencing depression?
What are our responsibilities then? Is this thing a human, a lab-rat, or a machine?
What exactly are "the functions of all 86 billion neurons"? I sense massive oversimplification here. Neurons have lots and lots of functions we have no idea how to simulate exactly, such as all the details of the thousands of networked internal metabolic mechanisms of any large mammalian cell, which most neural network simulations simply neglect.
Furthermore, we have plenty of evidence that the non-neuronal components of the brain (glia and oligodendroglia) massively influence brain functioning, and may be required for adequate cognition. Furthermore we have no way of knowing if a brain-in-a-vat will work the way a brain in the body, with all its connections, works. The above issues are just a start to the limitations of the scheme.
They're going to build the matrix!
To put it in perspective, that 86 billion neurons would be 86 "giga-neurons"; huh, conceptually not too overwhelming. Then we have the 100 trillion connections between them, or 100 "tera-connections"? Forget it.
Not to even mention (as someone already did) the initial state, then the learning process. To even form this structure in RAM would require, what? 40-50 more Moores Law iterations? Which I doubt is even physically possible.
I think this is the wrong approach, and even if possible, not in our lifetimes....
The CIA has a supercomputer doing this. It uses reflected RF energy from radio and TV transmitters to extract neural codes from the human brain and various nervous systems. Its been running for over 40 years now, using a planet full of reference targets, so I don't think this guy understands the scale of the enterprise he is proposing.
But, it would be good to have it in civilian hands.
Please don't waste your time with this nonsense.
1. It is not possible to simulate a system when you don't know the rules of the system. We don't know how neurons work. Sure, we know much about neurons and we can set up small networks that seem to give interesting results, but there is a vast amount about real neurons that is unknown. We don't even know what all the types of ion channels are, let alone the varied states of modulation (phosphorylation of proteins and binding of various neuromodulators). We know little about how the brain learns. We have some knowledge about how a neuron might maintain a mean firing rate over time or how certain connections may vary in fairly artificial stimulus regimes (pairs of spikes with varied timing) in slices of brain tissue (typically hippocampus) in vitro. We have only basic understanding of how the brain is wired up on a microscopic scale (e.g. cortical columns). At this point people are still making fundamental discoveries about how the retina works.
2. Throwing a supercomputer at the problem would be orders of magnitude too weak, even given huge simplifying assumptions, such as using "integrate and fire" neurons.
Anyone attempting to do whole brain simulations at this point is simply wasting their time and a lot of electricity. When they promote the idea they waste other people's time. A perfect example of this is the fool who claimed that he had simulated a cat visual cortex, which though only a presentation at a conference, not a published paper, got attention here on Slashdot. He included one equation and randomly connected his network and then simulated on a large compute cluster. His "chief scientific conclusion" was that he could replicate the propagation speed of data through the layers of the network - a feat that could have been accomplished with paper and pencil in less time.
Can't do it.
IIRC, the idea that the human brain runs entirely on classical interactions between neurons is one that is not settled science.
I suppose doing a simulation will lend some data to proving or disproving the theory, but to start out claiming that it will replicate the human brain makes some definitive a-priori claims. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No, you cannot make a supercomputer which will be a replica of the human brain. First of all, we don't know enough about the biochemical workings of the brain to do that. Every day the literature contains papers in which the incredibly complex soup inside cells shows us some ridiculous interaction we could not have predicted.
It would be the equivalent of building a lemonade stand, staffing it with a five-year-old, and claiming that you were replicating the US economy.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
use human DNA to program the simulation. If the the DNA in a human zygote can develop into a brain, why can't a simulation of the DNA develop into the simulation of a human brain?
Greed is the root of all evil.
It is like claiming that throwing a lot of transistors together in the form of a CPU and memory makes a working computer. Ever heard of _software_? Ever heard that software is actually orders or magnitude more complex than hardware? And ever heard that there are quantum-effects going on in synapses that cannot easily be simulated?
But those stupid enough to give money when the claims are just grand enough will give money for this as well, no doubt.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As a neuroscientist, this seems absurd. Not all neurons perform the same functions, some are very different in terms of structure and connections (pyramidal cell vs interneuron for example). We don't have a good sense for all the multitude of ways they can connect (via axon projections, or through retrograde signals at a given synapse). And we're just starting to appreciate the role that non neuron brain cells play in cellular communication - astrocytes release signaling molecules that modulate neuronal function (caffeine interferes with these) and they also regulate the amount of ions around neurons - in essence they enable neurons to change states.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
What if we put a giant pile of twinkies in the control room and some monitors playing old basketball games.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That's sorta the point of the experiment. We have no clue how the brain works. The best way to figure it out is to collect enough data to make a guess, run a simulation, and compare that simulation against more data. Once they've done enough closed loops of that (a lot of which will be on their rat brain model or other brains simpler than human brains so the simulations will be less computationally expensive), they will have a model which they are pretty sure works the same way as a human brain. Simply having that model and never running it (after the validation is considered complete) would be a huge contribution to neuroscience. A lesser, but still major, contribution would be the result of "we tried everything we can think of, but the human brain can't be explained by any of our models, so it must be far more complicated than we thought".
Kim Kardashian, that will make it a lot simpler...
In order to construct a virtual brain, doesn't that mean it has to be grown, virtually? What would be the environment in which it grows?
Posting as a scientist in robotics here.
Just simulating a brain won't work. This is indeed an old idea : just simulate the human brain, as close as possible to the real thing to the extend of hardware ressources, and you've created a mind.
Not so fast. More and more scientists in AI, machine learning, and robotics are coming to term with the idea that this pure-software approach won't ever work. You need hardware. To have a mind, you have to have a body. You have to be able to act and learn in a complex world in order to be able to form complex ideas. Because providing meaningful input to a simulated brain might be way harder than simulating it.
In TFA, Caltech professor Christof Koch is quoted saying "The roundworm has exactly 302 neurons, and we still have no frigging idea how this animal works.". You could easily simulate those 302 neurons on any desktop computer, figuring out how those are connected to the body, and what exactly they control, and then simulating the sensory organs of the roundworm that interact in a very complex manner with the world around it, because that's the signal that feeds the neurons, this is a whole other thing.
You end up with a very complex system, with different systems interacting, yet operating at very different timescales. It makes analyzing such system hard, and the more precise your simulation is, the more difficult it is to understand and analyse. You can go the robotic route, and build the body of the roundworm, but the technology is not anyway near what a roundworm can do, and even if you could, you lose a lot of control on how well you can know the state of your system. This is a hard problem, whichever which way you look at it.
Another reason to have a body comes from an idea Alan Turing proposed in his paper of 1950, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" : "Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? [...] The amount of work in the education we can assume, as a first approximation, to be much the same as for the human child.". You would need to raise a synthetic intelligence the same way you would a child. And in order to provide such synthetic entity meaningful, rich and diverse learning experiences, you need a body.
... The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety — from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness — is a lack of ambition.
This.
Also, the lack of any sort of a roadmap as to how to do this.
Also, the lack of any sort of definition for "consciousness", or any indication that it is an emergent property, or any way to measure when you've succeeded in making consciousness, or any theoretical evidence at all that it would arise from any specific plan.
We could model as many neurons as we like and it *still* wouldn't be a human brain unless we figure out how those neurons connect with each other. With no detailed plan, it's like trying to build a house by tacking boards together.
The "self-assured scientist" could start by telling us how a Cortical Column is wired up, how the feedback and feed-forward between columns works, and why artificial neural nets have inputs on one side and outputs on the other, when the brain apparently has both inputs and outputs on one side (in the sense of a functional diagram; ie - the efferent and afferent neurons connect to the same level of layer), and what the distinction is between these models.
If he can't solve basic issues, how can he hope to succeed in such a complex and ambitions project?
They did it in the 60s, they did it in the 70s. In the 80s and 90s they kept quiet, probably out of embarrassment. I guess that, after 30 years, they are ready to come across as fools once more.
... it says that white people have the right to have their own countries?
Will you destroy it in a fit of rage, after calling it a 'racist'?
LOL.
Presumably this 'brain' would be able to be restored from a backup to a known good state, and the simulation tweaked in some other direction. That's something human brains aren't capable of.
Instead of simulating a human brain, wouldn't it be better to start with something simplier. There is a worm that they have mapped out all of it's ells, from the egg up to fully grown. It wouldn't be much on conversation, but wouldn't it be better to simulate something like that to start with?
And when the experiment is over, you wouldn't have to worry about the ethics of "killing" it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
A pestilent child will bo lobbing antrax, smallpox, and/or ebola, not nukes. Get your WMD straight.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
If we were to be able to build an AI, what would we teach it? Stuff that's taught in school? Would we do anything to simulate social development? Would we let it read through 4chan?
So much of what makes us intelligent, rather than simply smart, is through experiences. So how would we simulate experiences?
I've helped build 2 brains, and you know what? They can't do SPIT at first, in fact about the only things they can do are suck, cry, pee, and poop. It takes YEARS before they start to show intelligence, and at first even that's quite flawed. It's a long process, and there's a LOT of time in there with the new brain in a state that only a mother (or father or grandparent) could love.
Who the heck things they're going to turn this on, train it for some interval short of a decade or two, and get sense out of it? They're probably also doing something stupid like trying to load it with facts at first, rather than letting it discover itself and its boundaries and limitations.
In our development of AI and our understanding of the human mind.
As to the rights of or risk of an artificial intelligence. I think if we're appropriately paranoid it will pose no risk of going skynet on us. And as to any abuses to the little fellow... he's going to be a billion dollar lab rat... and we he's going to exist at our sufferance and will be created by our will.
We will be this thing's mother and this thing's God. I have no problem assuming a role we've earned. If we create a sentient artificial mind we will have earned this right over that mind.
Given what we desire out of this technology we'll bend it to suit our needs and interests. This technology has no life outside of our industry and support. It cannot self sustain. It is not a free independent agent. Morally it belongs to us. We would own its soul having metaphorically formed it from the clay and breathed life into it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Locating lost car keys.
We discovered that eddy currents can excite nearby neurons that aren't even connected by synapses. This means the damn shape and size needs to be the same. Same size because of the inverse square relation of electromagnetic effects...
I believe that any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, because that's what sentient is. This type of research may help us study our own ethics and theory of the mind, but unless it's built to scale, or the simulation simulates at the quantum level (with the standard model, not an optimized neural network abstraction), then it won't be the same as a human's brain.
Sure, they may build a model of a person, but not all people are human...
This isn't AI people, it's neuroscientists. They have nothing to do with one another.
This is the crux of the problem. You can't create a human brain to start as an adult, if you didn't first create it from a child state. You can easily copy iterations, but until they get there, they will have nothing.
The rational thing to do is wait until computer technology is fast enough that doing this kind of project is cheap. Spending billions of dollars on it right now is a waste of money, and may not even get us there any faster. After all, Markram has no control over when CPUs, switches, and storage devices actually are fast enough.
Indeed, this seems to be something these sorts of projects forever overlook - the point. If you create a conscious model of the human brain, then you have all the same ethical problems experimenting on it as you would on an actual human, all you've done is drastically increase the potential benefits of doing so, and I for one do not particularly want to live in a world where it's accepted that you can experiment on someone's brain just because "the benefits are worth it".
You could possibly learn something new by just being able to watch it in action in excrutiating detail, but all the parts at least are only going to work in the manner you programmed them to, so really it comes down to a test case to see if our understanding of the component mechnisms of the brain has captured the "secret sauce" of consciousness. Even that though has major ethical considerations - it's unlikely to work right the first time, and all the intermediate attempts are rather analogous to intentionally creating children with severe brain damage.
And that's not to mention the fact that we may well need completely new technology to simulate a brain effectively - all existing computers are clocked, and any simulation is going to by necessity work in discrete time slices, which is completely unlike the totally asynchronous, continuous operation of an organic brain. Even if we can somehow manage the simulation by, for example, using extremely fine time slices and running it at a tiny fraction of real-time, it will still likely require several orders of magnitude more processing power than the human brain itself possesses. I mean the architectual differences mean it took a decent Pentium-class machine in order to be able to simulate an ancient AtariXT in real time, and those two systems are practically identical compared to a brain.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
From the article:
"There are too many things we don't yet know," says Caltech professor Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at one of neuroscience's biggest data producers, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. "The roundworm has exactly 302 neurons, and we still have no frigging idea how this animal works."
That's the problem. Just because we can extract the wiring diagram doesn't mean the components are well understood yet. Also, if we understood the components and how to wire them up, it would be cheaper to just build hardware. Simulating neurons is slow. It's like running SPICE instead of building circuits. Works, but there's about a 1000x or worse speed, power, and cost penalty. GPUs are often simulated at the gate level before making an IC; NVidia uses twenty or thirty racks of servers to simulate one GPU during development.
What bothers me about claims of strong AI is that I've heard it before. Ed Feigenbaum, the "expert systems" guy at Stanford, was running around in the 1980s, promising Strong AI Real Soon Now if only he could funding for a giant national AI lab headed by him. He even testified before Congress on that. Expert systems were a dead end.
Rod Brooks from MIT went down this road too. His COG project had a robotic head and some arms, some facial expressions, and a lot of hype. Work ceased on that embarrassment in 2003. He'd done good artificial insect work, but the jump to human level was way too big.
This is the hubris problem in AI. Too many people have approached this claiming their One Big Idea would lead to strong AI. So far, not even close.
All the mammals have similar DNA and brain architecture. A mouse brain is about 1g; a human brain is about 1000g. So build a simulated mouse brain and demonstrate it works, or STFU.
And naturally a petulant pestilent child is that much worse.
Perhaps he is deliberately overstating the case.
Clearly contemporary science and technology are not ready to simulate a human brain, but perhaps getting people excited about a grandiose albeit unrealistic goal will facilitate some more reasonable project that will stand a chance of increasing our knowledge of the brain.
Having no goal would not help science either.
And it's not a given that we will have the breakthroughs we need to create a supercomputer that can handle the simulations on a scale needed anytime soon. Basically, GPU acceleration gave a nice bump in super computing power, but the fundamentals of power consumption, memory hierarchy and interconnection still remain. See the link at the bottom for a compelling presentation of the challenges.
Building machine of this size is a worthwhile as it can address lots of interesting scientific problems. And, trying to simulate a brain can lead to more research on how our brains actually work and lead to new understanding of brain disorder.
As for sticking a "human" in a computer, well, I doubt that's the goal of the author. I know it is for some, but what's the point. As the slides above show, the human brain is at least a million times more power efficient that the best case for a supercomputer on the scale needed. No shortage of human brains (quite the opposite). Such a machine would help understand the brain in ways that we can't do now, not a way to live forever.
(https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B83UyWf1s-CdZnFoS2RiU2lJbEU/edit)
Wouldn't a major feature of the design be emulating how a wetware brain can reconfigure it's own neural connections? I'm assuming here that we're talking about creating a "blank slate" brain and allowing it to learn and develop it's own personality.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
>You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies.
It could also run all the worlds defense systems.
Or even better how about our court systems. It would only take a millisecond to make a totally fair judge decision. That would save some tax money too.
The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
If scientists persist in trying to play God with projects like this, they are going to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
War, Famine, Death, and Petulance.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What about processor in memory like schemes using memristers..etc as fake neurons. It will run in hardware, scale better and consume a lot less power than emulating all this crap in a normal computer.
People tried to fly by building bird or bat replicas for centuries. They didn't work (and still don't). But by actually studying flight and understanding the principles involved, we finally got working airplanes.
Just "copying" a human brain is no guarantee that you'll produce any kind of intelligence. You need to understand HOW the brain gets intelligence out of its structure and what the underlying mechanisms of thought are. Maybe we already do have this level of understanding, but I doubt it. If we really did, instead of trying to build a slavish copy of a human brain, we'd be designing something optimal or superior instead.
Will we have to give it human rights?
Uhhh, pass the needle and thread?
Unless the brain taps into some unknown force of nature, it can be completely simulated and run on any computer available today. Might run a little slow on a flip phone, but still..
Completely insane project! And anyway, strong AI is a joke, it's never going to happen. If you don't believe me, check out Noam Chomsky.
... once you've built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies.
You can watch it go immediately insane from sensory deprivation.
Modeling the brain is not enough. You have to model enough of its supporting systems and environment to keep it functioning.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around
As long as they don't give the supercomputer legs, it won't be running around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If it does become sentient or at least passes the turing test, will you kill it? If you do, and it passed the turing test you are killing something that can at worst simulate intelligence at the level of a human.
Do you give it a natural method of decay like a human brain? If you don't do you just keep it running forever or flip the switch.
Abby.
Abby who?
Abby Normal.
You had me put an abnormal brain in a seven-foot tall monster!?
Once someone successfully build a computer that can simulate 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connection all at the same time, someone else will build an even bigger computer that can do 10x as much, and then someone will attempt to up that ... ad nauseum
What will happen then, when the computer we build is 100x or even 1,000,000x more capable than our brain ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I thought we already built a supercomputing replica of a human brain. Unfortunately, the model we used was Sarah Palin's brain. We ended up with an abacus. ;-)
This is assuming that there is such a thing as a blank slate brain, or that any brain can be shaped in arbitrary ways.
Brains grow. In fact, learning to play an instrument at an early age can actually cause changes to the folds of the brain visible to the naked eye. That is a dramatic example, but I'm sure there are a bazillion subtle ways the physical wiring of the brain gets set in near-permanent ways as it is forming. Some of that might be the result of experience, but some is likely the result of genetics, or even just chance.
The ultimate lie detector, your own brain.
Its already been done moron, thats why they dont want to do it publicly
Instead of simulating a human brain, wouldn't it be better to start with something simplier. There is a worm that they have mapped out all of it's ells, from the egg up to fully grown. It wouldn't be much on conversation, but wouldn't it be better to simulate something like that to start with?
And when the experiment is over, you wouldn't have to worry about the ethics of "killing" it.
How starting with a rat? With only 56 million neurons, it's 3 orders of magnitude easier.
first
Wait! You're misunderstanding him. He means that it is a stupid question and that if we must answer the question then it is that we should build a supercomputer replica of a human brain is so that we can say we did it first. He wants to put science back on the map. He wants to make our children interested in solving the problems of tomorrow. He wants us to be first!
Or they just want to post first...
It is up to you what you believe.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think you mean pressure cooker.
We are just that. A complex piece of machinery. And eventually we come to realize that as we get more and more advanced and that our creation are nothing more than replicas of us and all the time, the easiest way to make those machines was just to keep procreating! :)
If scientists persist in trying to play God with projects like this, they are going to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
War, Famine, Death, and Petulance.
Shan't play your pocklips! Shan't! It's smelly!
Mars pocklips has red snow! Venus has smulfic acid rain! Andromeda's parents bought her a whole glacksy to smash!
Your pocklips is a silly little wet, silly, smelly one, and, and and it smells!
Waaaaaa!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Event sourcing. snapshots are not the whole story.
Better believe it.
I must be missing the reference......
People obsess on how many neurons/connections there are in the human brain. While that is important, many of those have little if anything to do with human consciousness and identity specific memories. When you eliminate those needed for maintaining autonomic functions, processing sensory input, etc the number of them will be much smaller. I would imagine that a large amount is needed for sensory processing and storing memories needed to interpret input. When building an AI or even moving a human mind into a computer system; many of those functions could be made generic from one AI/person to the next. We all know the shape of a ball, a road, the smell of fire, etc. A neural network cross referencing system to a conventional computer database would likely be adequate to provide those.
You could likely reduce personality down to a series of base parameters to various core personality elements. Each one would include the base & range starting point of the personality element and learned modification from the base point. A good example of this is gender identity in humans. Imagine a number line with zero in the center, masculine going one direction, feminine going another. A person’s default would be somewhere on that line, they would have a range of likely expression they are born with, life experience would modify that base point and change the likely range of response. You could boil human personality down to a large number of items such as this. Things like response to humor, anger, stress, etc. I really think that the key to AI is building a personality/emotion system not unlike a complex color chart. You make different colors by mixing primaries; you would make different emotional responses by mixing primary emotions. Figuring out which emotions and personality types are primary is the key.
I don’t think a true artificial consciousness is possible without emotions.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
It's called scientific imagination. As self-referencing brains we already know we do not know how they work. A simulation of the human brain will have as much value. Wow, I just discovered this. The natural conclusion is the brain is very much a part of its sensations. To simulate the human brain you must also simulate it's sensations.
This is how the terminators get us.
accessing someones open account on facebook is not hacking
A computer should do what it is good at: compute. The fact that the only thing we can come up with is emulate neurons shows we don't know how they work and what the objective is.
nosig today
It doesn't need to be a mirror image, but it needs to "develop" in the same manner.
The brain is plastic.
simulating that needs simulating quite a lot more than what the guy is proposing, hence why people label his project as impossible.
we have trouble modelling the interactions of a few hundred atoms. never mind all the atoms the brain has. HOWEVER THAT IS UNDER CONSTANT RESEARCH already without dumping cash on this guy and "following his lead".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Someone *whose* brain is concerned with correct grammar, obviously!
Don't we have those already?
The problem with such a thing will be that unless it is ALOT faster than the brain (which is a parallel processor with 30 billion cells all at work at once)
it will take as long as a human to learn.
Even if faster for that, coming up with the training data (even if its real life immersion) AND the 'right and wrong' part of learning requires slow humans to compose.
Its the old problem with hard AI even now that we are starting to get mechanisms fast/broad enough to do the simulation.
Im not saying dont do it, as there will be alot of actually figuring out how the brain works as part of it and of course technology will move forward.
But Im afraid like AI expectations from the 50s to present there will be ALOT of underestimating whats involved.
so we can find out why conseravtives are such retards.
Fluid dynamics has the same problem, as you mention via proxy of "a few hundred atoms" - looking in from the outside, it seems that the lessons learned simulating that could be applied here?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Merely summing up the number of switches and connections ignores the fact that the brain is a special purpose machine. It has a physical, and logical, organization which fits its purpose to its environment. So it is far more powerful than a general purpose quantum machine might be, just like the Bletchley Park Mark 2 Colossus decrypting machine was more powerful than the binary sum of its thermionic valves.
Couple of FPGA's should do it.
What we need in order to simulate the human brain is to find a way to store the input a human has in a computer and process it in real time.
Humans have 5 senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste.
In order to simulate a human brain, we need to find a way to store these inputs, in a way a brain does.
When we figure this out, making human-like AI would be dead-easy, because all the brain does is pattern matching on the inputs stored to find the response that maximizes its survival potential.
it's not just you
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Don't worry, asking for a working mind from the ground up is like asking for a manned trip to the other side of the galaxy -- we don't have nearly enough knowledge about how the bran and nervous system works to begin to even start contemplating it. Someday? Maybe. Today? Impossible.
I'd say a more feasable (yet probably still impossible with the knowledge we have) is to model a fly's brain.
We don;t even know what consciousness is or what causes it. Good luck recreating something you don't understand, it's like handing an aborigine a transistor radio and asking him to make a working copy of it.
What we know is a rounding error compared to what we don't.
And don't get me started on petulant pestilent postulating children!
The man doesn't have any pretensions that what he is doing isn't just a job and isn't anything more serious than entertainment.
"It's" is a contraction for "it is". Its is the possessive.
Bob's wife mary's computer's RAM is too small. His idea is that her computer should have its RAM replaced; it's too small.
</unwanted education>
You do understand that there is no blank slate? You do understand that everything about human behavior is biological in origin? Including personality?
Wouldn't that be three? I mean after all, after the third how would anyone know whether the fourth ever occurred?
He will build a cool computer.
We still don't really know what neurons store.
Then how can we build a machine to simulate how it works?
"If the brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't"
- Lyall Watson
Maybe it won't turn out to be true, but there's that whole Godel's incompleteness thing in play here it seems.
Are you perhaps postulating a petulant pestilent child with pustules?
We don't have the hardware to do this yet, IBM tried and failed with Watson. So Who cares about who's brain would it replicate
Rather obviously there is no way to have a complete success in just one go.
What Markham leaves out is that from the first neurons formed, inputs of some kind would be needed to simulated the complete sensorium, such as it may be, that is 'known' to the embryo's not-yet-formed brain, and continuing from there. From what I read, it seems he want to build a complete physical model and flip the switch. It's unknown what that might give us, but it is some kind of start.
Can the entire process be shorted, by simply building the whole thing and flipping a power switch? I don't think so. No, I'm guessing it would be more reasonable - and a whole bunch more tedious - to model the whole thing to parallel what we think we know already of brain development and inputs, gaps and unknowns alike, see where it goes. So, I think it'd be possible to build out a 'complete' brain of parts, and enable sections to conform with actual brain development, and all done with continual modeling of inputs. Snapshots would be needed to account for power outages and new learning both - it would allow for a bit of 'do-overs'. Then take what is found, warts and all, and start again.
Eventually we might be able to model the entire process, and that, I think, makes an interesting project, and one worthy of pursuit. It would require some patience and long-term commitment.
Skynet reference. Seriously though, would a machine like this be self-aware from the outset?
dare i see another disciple of the mighty paracelsus, doctor and heretic, refusing to live by the dogma of the ancients alone? That should be something. But as far as my limited knowleddge of neurobiology goes this would result in a purely biological simulation of a perfect brain that hasn't been subject to any kind of minor or major physical trauma. How psychological trauma would be translated in there i can't even begin to imagine but i'm not a sceptic when it comes to people trying daunting tasks. I'm not a neuroscientist either. ... i feel it comes from everywhere together into some kind of formless blob that can't even be expressed properly in words
this should be something, no matter what knowledge and insight should be gained unless he takes the money and runs
finally maybe we'll discover what is the speed of non-linear thought. My quantum entangled dendrites, capable of forming ideas from different points in spacetime at the same moment and place in spacetime, tell me however (they're a bit more skeptical than i am) this will probably not be achieved in this generation but i'd love to see what comes of it. Unless thought goes from a to b and then to c like they tried to tell me in schools
but i'm a madman ofcourse, and a clown for that matter, a bit like that stephen king character at times, i also suffer from narcissism accordidng to at least one person so maybe i'll best shut up
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?